Moby Dick

>implying I want to make an effort to convince some retards on an anonymous image board
And if you honestly think I had any emotional response you must be projecting.

>And if you honestly think I had any emotional response you must be projecting.
So if it's not your emotions that caused you to lash out, I guess you have a pure logical reason, like a psychopath.
The only thing you don't give us is your interpretation on Moby Dick.

Before I came to Veeky Forums I attempted to read the white whale. I was captured by the writing for many chapters especially by the gross amount of detail and the uncanny delving into Cetacea, but once they actually saw the white whale I was burnt out. It was fun for a while but it felt like a chore to read. I determined to return to it, believing that it was my schedule that has prevented me from continuing the book. Then I came to/lit/ and saw everyone else's assessment was somewhat similar. I still would like to give the book a second try some day, but it's nothing I'll obsess over.

Idk what you're saying, but The Spirit-spout and The Grand Armada are two of the most beautiful units of literature I've ever read.

Consider the style he uses, and the comparisons he makes during those chapters. It isn't just neutral toned, encyclopedic style, and the references aren't solely to whaling textbooks, but other literature and the Bible.
I won't hold your hand any further.

>Then I came to/lit/ and saw everyone else's assessment was somewhat similar.

Just a few months ago the consensus was that it's the greatest American book. I'd guess this thread is mostly full of contrarian brainlets.

I was like you in that I was captivated but burnt out before finishing it. I attempted to read it maybe 3 or 4 times over as many years and only finished it early this year. Every few pages I had to stop to wipe my yees because the whole thing is so beautiful and I can't recommend it enough.

I don't know if this has been confirmed anywhere but I'm sure that D.H. Lawrence's Whales Weep Not! was directly inspired by The Grand Armada.

Adding to this, there was legitimate complaint that people didn't understand how the story was being told if the protagonist died (the first print in England didn't have the epilogue); so it's sensible that Melville had to establish credibility to Ishmael's whaling experience.

>read old books
>author starts off by describing how the "author" found a manuscript that you are now reading yada yada
was everyone just a brainlet? was it the poor nutrition?

I've not even read Moby Dick but this guy being so mad that it was 2deep4him is pretty funny.

Itt

Plebs

I think you need a Classical education and like Melville had to truly understand Moby Dick. There's a shit ton of references I didn't get during my first reading of the novel. The prose starts out extremely good and the sermon is one of the best pieces of literature I have ever read in my life.

>attaching meaning to the most obvious metaphor in literary history
how horrible!

Except everyone hated Moby Dick when it came out

no, it was so they couldn't be taken to court.
and it furthered the distance between the author and the story, and made it a lote more 'realistic', it was standard practice in epistolary novels.

Reminder that Ahab is the protagonist

did they really?

His "intellectual respons" was that you haven't read the book, which you did not refute.

Mein neger, The Sermon is a 10/10 chapter

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

You'll be able to appreciate it, one day

>I think you need a Classical education and like Melville had
You mean high school?

A whale-ship was his Yale college and his Harvard.

>The beginning started out great but seriously I think this book is only popular because blah blah blah

Yep, partly because of a less than stellar initial release in England which also tainted whatever criticism it received in America. It wasn't until ~100 years later that opinion began to turn around for the work.

Came here to agree with your objectively good taste in literature, the sermon chapter was great (and based on Melville's experience of dipping into a church before shipping out whaling).

Every chapter of this book is great.
The Mast-Head and the Whiteness of the Whale are among my absolute favorites.
If you don't get it it's because you are fed simple minded narratives all your life and you can't engage with complex ways of saying things.

Good night.

Are there actually people who dislike this? Or are they trolling.

No more like learning Greek and Latin. Also reading most of the Greek and Roman high literature.

Several chapters in the middle dragged ass but the beginning and end are top-notch and Melville expresses himself beautifully.

I hated reading it, because it felt like a dry wall of text. Once I put it down, and thought about it, I realized how well it was written.

Cetology in Moby-Dick is the most well known pleb filter out there and you've outed yourself a pleb

Nigga i played MGS2:Sons Of Liberty
fuck off.

Regardless of what you may say about the amount of boring chapters and and over analysis, the fact remains that Moby Dick had the most breathtaking prose of any book in the English language. Yes, even Shakespeare

My favorite passage from the book

Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

DELET

Haha . This reminds me of that image of fractal wrongness, where the wrongness of every possible iteration of their arguments is self similar with the wrongness of their entire worldview

I tell you don't get complex ways of saying things and you quote the only game were the plot is explained to you over and over in 45 minutes codec calls?
You could have at least said you played Dark Souls...

..... I hate u so much

If I was captain, I would hate to have Ishmael on crew. Granted he even says as much on his own usefulness while on lookout, but damn guy, at least pretend to spy a whale.

>Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me

moby-dick isn't even that long or that difficult
you're just actually stupid

Perhaps Ahab, being a relatively cultured man, enjoyed having a few other cultured men on board. I imagine it would become dreary for a cultured man to have no company but crude illiterates for months on end.